March 18, 2026

4 min read

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The AI boom is dangerously dependent on helium

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has trapped a third of the world’s commercial helium, threatening the irreplaceable coolant that makes MRI scanners and advanced microchips possible

By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Eric Sullivan

A technician inspects a silicon wafer at a semiconductor fabrication facility. Chipmakers depend on helium, most critically during the etching process, to precisely control wafer temperature.

Lv Zhiyao/Zhejiang Daily Press Group/VCG via Getty Images

Days after the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow waterway through which roughly one fifth of the world’s oil passes—closed. While oil has dominated headlines, a third of the world’s commercial helium comes from Qatar and has also been cut off.

Often associated with party balloons, helium is indispensable to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, aerospace and the manufacture of microchips for artificial intelligence. With the strait closed, the disruption of the global helium supply chain could have ripple effects that might last for months and affect the most advanced technologies on Earth.

Yet the crisis arrives at a time when the helium market has been awash in surplus, which mitigates the war’s immediate effect. “There is going to be a shortage,” says Phil Kornbluth, founder of Kornbluth Helium Consulting. But the big question, he says, is its duration.

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“There are three helium plants in Qatar, and two of them produce helium from the waste gas from LNG [liquefied natural gas] plants,” Kornbluth says. The LNG gets loaded onto tankers whose only path to the ocean is through the Strait of Hormuz. “When the Strait of Hormuz is closed, once the LNG storage tanks get filled, they have to shut down,” he says. Military attacks against Qatar’s facilities have also contributed to the closure of the plants.

Though worrisome, the math is far from catastrophic. With a 30 percent loss of global capacity offset by a recent 15 percent supply overhang, Kornbluth estimates a net shortage of around 15 percent. Suppliers pump most of the world’s helium into 11,000-gallon cryogenic containers that are loaded onto trucks and craned onto cargo ships. The supply chain is long and slow: helium that shipped out of Qatar right before the war started may still be on its journey. “There’s no physical shortage right now at the end-user level,” Kornbluth says. “It’s kind of like a nice sunny day on the beach, but you heard there’s a tsunami out there. You’ve got to get out of the way.”

Because the industry relies on roughly 2,000 expensive helium containers, many of which are now stuck in Qatar or on cargo ships en route, the initial pinch will feel worse until those tanks are repositioned. Even if the strait opened tomorrow, Kornbluth says, the supply disruption will last at least two extra months.

Major suppliers will likely declare force majeure and raise prices, following the playbook of the four previous shortages over the past 20 years.

But this shortage arrives just as the semiconductor industry has become the largest consumer of helium, overtaking MRI scanners in recent years. Chip manufacturers try to keep helium reserves, but the gas is notoriously difficult to contain. “Helium can leak out about 0.1 to 1 percent per month, depending on how good the gaskets are,” says Lita Shon-Roy, president and CEO of TECHCET, a semiconductor materials advisory firm. “There’s never a good gasket or fitting. It just leaks over time.”

Historically, chip fabricators have kept as little inventory on hand as possible. But after pandemic supply chain shocks, she says, fabricators shifted from keeping days of inventory to stockpiling.

If the war continues, the regions that will feel the effect first are those that are dependent on Qatar: Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—home to the world’s most advanced chip fabrication facilities, or fabs.

In chipmaking, fabricators rely on helium most crucially during etching—the selective removal of material to give a chip its features. An advanced AI chip can pack tens of billions of transistors, requiring extreme precision. “You’ve got to image it, define a pattern and then etch out unwanted materials,” says Mike Corbett, managing partner and co-founder of Linx Consulting. “Etch could literally